The Captured Ba Thist State Records From The 2003 Iraq War: Repatriation and Retribution? by Bruce P. Montgomery and Michael P. Brill

A HOOVER INSTITUTION ESSAY FROM THE CARAVAN NOTEBOOK
The Middle East and the Islamic World

The Captured Baʿthist State Records
from the 2003 Iraq War: Repatriation
and Retribution?
BRUCE P. MONTGOMERY AND MICHAEL P. BRILL
On May 16, 2013, amid Iraq’s descent into renewed sectarian conflict and civil war,
the administration of President Barack H. Obama covertly repatriated millions of
seized Baʿthist regime records from the 2003 war to the loyalist security services
of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.1 The repatriated documents contained reams
of personal identifiable information on former military and security officials, as well as
numerous private individuals under Saddam Hussein’s Baʿthist state. While mundane
budget cuts largely drove the Defense Department to unload the seized documents—less
than eighteen months after US troops left Iraq in 2011—the Maliki regime had furtively
pursued their restitution at the highest levels. It was no surprise that the return of the
seized documents into the hands of Maliki’s security services was kept under wraps. Nor is it
a surprise that their restitution has raised questions about whether Maliki’s sectarian-driven
regime, perhaps assisted by Iranian intelligence, exploited the incriminating files against
the Sunni Arab elites, as well as against the prime minister’s Kurdish and Shiʿite Islamist
political rivals.
These questions merit inquiry given that the repatriation of the captured records
occurred as Maliki was increasing his authoritarian grip on power, cleansing Sunni Arab
politicians from the government, abandoning the Sons of Iraq Awakening Councils to the
resurgent Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), and violently confronting the rapidly
growing Arab Sunni protest movement in the provinces. The extent to which the repatriation
contributed to sectarian targeting and violence, leading to renewed civil war, may never be
known. Nonetheless, it is hoped that this research will prompt current and former US and
Iraqi sources to break their silence, as well as lead other researchers to investigate this subject.
Although a State Department official has stated that there is “no evidence” that the repatriated
records were misused, a former high-level diplomat with substantial experience in Iraq has
said that it is a “pretty good assumption” that they were.2 It would be naive to presume that
Maliki’s security services did not exploit this rich trove of intelligence against the regime’s
sectarian adversaries and political rivals.3 The surreptitious nature of the restitution, as Iraq
was lurching toward another civil war, has raised misgivings—not only that Maliki’s regime
exploited the documents for sectarian retribution and political score-settling, but that their
misuse may have played a role in fueling the rise of ISIS in 2014.
2
The 2013 repatriation also is linked to the clandestine return, seven years later in
August 2020, of another major cache of Saddam-regime documents from the 2003 war—the
Baʿth Regional Command records held by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. The
archive had been deposited at Hoover in 2008 by the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF),
founded by the Iraqi dissident, political opponent, and Brandeis University professor
emeritus of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Kanan Makiya.4 The IMF had assumed
custody of the records after entering Iraq on the tail of the 2003 US invasion to rescue
the archives of the atrocity of Saddam’s murderous regime. Nonetheless, two years
later, the sectarian violence and armed insurrection against the occupation compelled
the IMF to flee Iraq—but not without the help of the US military, which airlifted the
archive to the US for its intelligence value. The archive remained at Hoover for twelve years
until its quiet return in 2020, shortly after the prime-ministerial appointment of the
pro-American Mustafa al-Kadhimi—one of the founders of the IMF. The archive’s
restitution, however, provoked considerable anxiety among Kadhimi’s national security
advisors, who had the records spirited away to a secure, undisclosed location—likely
intent on avoiding the social and political aftershocks of the 2013 repatriation.
This article will discuss the fate of the three major caches of seized documents that were
returned by US institutions to Iraq under dramatically different circumstances: (1) the
Baʿth Party and secret police files seized by the Kurds in the March 1991 uprising, held
by the Archives at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries and returned to Baghdad
in 2005 for the Anfal trials of Saddam Hussein and his senior henchmen; (2) the vast trove
of records captured in the 2003 war in the hunt for unconventional weapons, held by
the US military in Qatar and covertly returned in 2013 to Iraq’s sectarian-driven security
services; and (3) the Baʿth Regional Command records, rescued by the IMF in Baghdad after
the US-led invasion in 2003, deposited at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, and
discreetly returned to Kadhimi’s government in 2020.5
In researching this article we uncovered many details concerning the records repatriated
in 2013, though much remains shrouded in secrecy. The captured Iraqi documents from the
2003 war remain a sensitive subject for many of the US officials and government agencies
involved in their restitution. More than two dozen current and former officials spoke with
or communicated in writing with the authors, but only on condition of anonymity. We
filed many Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with government agencies; as of
this writing, many have been rejected and some are still pending.6 None has been filled.
Nevertheless, some documents on the subject from other sources were made available to
the authors.
This article’s research methodology combines both investigative-journalistic and historical

approaches to the subject. Writing for the New Republic in 1943, Alan Barth declares,
“News is only the first rough draft of history.”7 This article aims to serve, at the very least,
as a substantial second draft. Beyond the primary aims of this inquiry, the restitution of the
Bruce P. Montgomery and Michael P. Brill • The Captured Baʿthist State Records from the 2003 Iraq War
3
archives of Saddam Hussein’s regime provides a unique perspective on the nature of US-Iraq
bilateral relations over the past decade. The relevance of this subject also extends beyond
Iraq, serving as a cautionary tale regarding the perils of repatriating state security records of
a former dictatorial state to an unstable and vengeful post-authoritarian government more
interested in retribution than national reconciliation and the rule of law.
Prelude: The Anfal Files

The repatriation of the Baʿth Regional Command archive in 2020 involved the last major
cache of records to be returned to Iraq following the 1991 and 2003 wars.8 Nearly three
decades earlier, after Saddam’s defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, the Kurdish population in northern
Iraq seized the opportunity for freedom, rising in rebellion against a gravely weakened Baʿthist
regime. In the uprising, the Kurds captured eighteen tons of Baʿth Party and secret police
records detailing the “Anfal campaigns” in Iraqi Kurdistan, a counterinsurgency turned genocide
in the mid-to-late 1980s. Saddam’s military campaign to subdue a Kurdish insurgency rapidly
escalated into a rampage of destruction and mass murder in retaliation for the Kurdish
Peshmerga militia’s alliance with the Iranians in the Iran–Iraq war.
The history surrounding these captured Baʿth Party and secret police records augured the
political and sectarian enmities that would plague the restitution of the Baʿthist documents
seized in the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. During the 1991 uprising, various Kurdish resistance
parties had taken possession of the documents, secreting most of them away to remote
mountain hideouts before Saddam could send reinforcements to crush the rebellion and
wreak vengeance—which drove more than a million refugees in desperate flight to the
border regions of Iran and Turkey.
Saddam’s violent suppression of the Kurdish revolt prompted the United States and its
allies to intervene in late 1991 to impose a no-fly zone and safe haven in the north
that allowed the Kurds to establish self-rule. The two dominant, adversarial parties,
the Talibani family–led Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Barzani family–led
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), agreed to a power-sharing arrangement. The two bitter
rivals entered the arrangement despite their history of mutual treachery, which had been
exacerbated by Saddam’s strategy of sowing division among the Kurds.
Saddam’s security directorate and military intelligence had recruited tens of thousands of Kurds
into the Kurdish National Defense Battalions.9 The Kurdish rebels called them “jash,” meaning
“little donkey” or “traitors” doing the regime’s dirty work. According to some estimates,
they numbered about 250,000 men at the height of the Baʿthist regime’s power. The jash
forces became complicit in the Anfal campaigns to destroy the Kurdish resistance throughout
northern Iraq during and after the Iran–Iraq war. But many turned against Saddam and joined
the resistance in the 1991 rebellion, while others remained loyal to the Baʿthist regime. Even
so, many jash were hunted down and murdered during and after the uprising.10
Hoover Institution • Stanford University

4
Among the first decisions of the incipient Kurdish government was to pardon individuals
who had collaborated with Saddam’s regime, including during the Anfal.11 The power-sharing
arrangement, however, broke down in 1994 with the outbreak of the intra-Kurdish civil war.
Threatened by Iranian support for the PUK, the fighting reached its perfidious nadir in 1996
when Masoud Barzani, leader of the KDP, appealed to Saddam for assistance to defeat the
PUK. More than one hundred Iraqi tanks and thirty thousand troops invaded and imposed
KDP control of Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan. With the backing of Iraqi forces, the KDP also
overran the PUK stronghold of Sulaymaniyah, though the PUK’s forces would later recapture
the city.
Under the 1998 peace agreement brokered by Washington that ended the civil conflict,
the two factions divided Kurdistan into two regional governments—a “power-sharing
dictatorship”—with the KDP ruling in the north and the PUK in the south.12 According
to Ferdinand Hennerbichler, former Austrian diplomat and professor of history at the
University of Sulaymaniyah, though Kurdistan’s oligarchs ostensibly reigned over the
regions, in “reality the KDP north is ruled by the Turkish [Consulate] General in Erbil
and the PUK south by the Iranian one in Sulaymaniyah.”13 The precarious position of
Iraq’s Kurdish parties made them increasingly reliant on their principal foreign patrons.
Despite their history of betrayal, both parties had separately agreed—in 1992 and 1993—to
send their share of the captured Baʿth Party and secret police files to the US for analysis,
although they first searched the records for informants and collaborators in their ranks who
had worked for Saddam’s regime. Under the protection of US fighter planes, truck convoys
hauled the captured documents in several shipments across northern Iraq to a staging area
near the Turkish border. From there, they were transported to Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base
where the Pentagon airlifted them to the US in two separate shipments in May 1992 and
August 1993. The US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which held legal custody
of the files, then entrusted their storage to the National Archives at a branch facility in
Maryland.14
The documents detailed mass executions, disappearances, forced deportations, poison

gas attacks, and the razing of towns and villages, culminating in the Anfal campaign
against the Kurds and other minority groups in 1988.15 Senator Claiborne Pell, chair of
the US Senate Foreign Relations committee, compared the slaughter of the Kurds to the
Holocaust. The documents, Pell said, could support hauling Iraq before an international
tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity and genocide.16
The US government subsequently gave Human Rights Watch (HRW) exclusive access
to study the documents for a possible genocide case against Saddam’s regime. Under
HRW’s direction, from 1992 to 1994 the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) provided
logistical assistance in digitizing the records, creating 176 CD-ROMs.17 After studying
the secret police files and other medico-legal evidence, HRW concluded that Saddam’s Anfal
5
campaign constituted genocide.18 But HRW’s ensuing efforts to prosecute the Baʿthist
state before the World Court at The Hague under the 1948 Genocide Convention failed
to mobilize sufficient international support.19
In 1998, the DIA distributed several copies of the CD-ROMs to the PUK and KDP, as well as
to the Iraq Research and Documentation Project and the University of Colorado Boulder
Archives, the latter of which also received the original Baʿth Party and secret police files
with the authorization of the Senate Foreign Relations committee.20 The PUK and KDP
received the copies around the same time they were negotiating an end to their bloody
civil war that killed thousands of Kurds. Despite their peace agreement, the two rival
factions furtively exploited the incendiary digital files to “threaten” and “incriminate”
individuals and “political enemies”—while concealing them from the public. Among
the files on the CD-ROMs were numerous personnel lists and payroll records of jash
collaborators and informants, who earned more than Saddam’s own secret police and
intelligence agents had.21
Neither party displayed interest in publicly releasing the files with the aim of fostering
intra-Kurdish reconciliation or exposing the Kurdish public to their authoritarian past
under the Baʿthist state. Instead, the files were used as political weapons, according to
Hennerbichler. Both parties gleaned incriminating information from the files “in the
background . . . not in the open,” resorting to “Mafia-style crippling or finishing off [of]
arch enemies among Iraqi Kurds.”22 As a result, the Kurds continued their blood feuds
and revenge killings of jash throughout the 1990s and beyond.23 The exploitation of the
informant files in searching for traitors, enemies, and rivals within and outside their party
ranks portended the ways in which the archives of Saddam’s regime would be abused by
both the Kurds and the future order presided over by the majority Shiʿite Islamist parties
after the 2003 war.
The fate of the captured Baʿth Party and secret police files took an abrupt turn after the
2003 US invasion of Iraq when Saddam and eleven of his top lieutenants were captured and
transferred in 2004 into the legal custody of the Iraqi interim government to stand trial.
The University of Colorado Boulder Archives turned over the original records in 2005 to the
US Justice Department’s Regime Crimes Liaison Task Force, which shipped them to Baghdad
for the Anfal trials.24 The files were returned to Baghdad shortly after the Pentagon airlifted
the Baʿth Regional Command archive in the possession of the IMF to the US. The transfers
of Baʿthist state documents to and from the US occurred as Iraq fell into sectarian violence
and civil war—animated largely by the atrocities and grievances detailed in the Saddam
regime’s documents. After their shipment from Colorado to Baghdad, the Anfal files were
secured at a former Baʿthist regime prison in the Kadhimiyya neighborhood before being
transferred to the trial court.25 The Iraqis had chosen to try Saddam and his henchmen
before a specially constituted court in Baghdad—the Special High Tribunal—rather than
an ad hoc international criminal tribunal created by the United Nations Security Council.26

6
Among Saddam’s captured associates was his notorious first cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid
(“Chemical Ali”), the secretary general of the Northern Bureau of Iraq’s Baʿth Party and
overlord of the Anfal campaigns.27 In December 2006, amid the violence and chaos,
Prime Minister Maliki preempted Saddam’s Anfal trial by rushing him to the gallows after
his conviction for another crime—the 1982 Dujail massacre involving his own Shiʿite
Islamist–based Daʿwa Party.28 Al-Majid was also sent to the gallows in 2010 after receiving
eight death sentences by the tribunal.
The Baʿth Party and secret police documents captured in the 1991 uprising remain a
source of anxiety in Kurdistan. In October 2014, University of Colorado Boulder officials
presented a hard drive of the secret police CD-ROMs to a visiting Kurdish delegation.
The hard drive is now housed in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan, at the Zheen Center, but its
directors see it “as a constant danger for their lives and existence” and are too fearful to
make the database publicly available to researchers.29 Their fear seems to be warranted.
According to Hennerbichler, even though it has been almost twenty years since the fall of
the Baʿthist state, former Kurdish collaborators continue to face “risks of revenge killings.”
Kurdish families that had been “betrayed by the jash, including the two leading Kurdish
families [the Talibanis and Barzanis] and the parties that they dominate, have continued to
seek revenge in the absence of justice. Blood feuds and revenge killings have not relented.”30
In June 2019, the University of Colorado Boulder also returned fifty-seven boxes of

original Baʿthist files to Iraqi Kurdistan that were inadvertently left behind in the transfer
of the documents to the Special High Tribunal in Baghdad in 2005. The files have been
stored separately under the protection of “pro-US committed Kurds,” but it is unlikely
that these documents will see the light of day.31 Moreover, according to Kurdish sources,
sectarian Shiʿite militias ransacked the secret police files housed at the Tribunal, looking
for incriminating information against Kurdish adversaries and Baʿthist operatives of
Saddam’s security apparatus.
The Anfal files held at the Tribunal may have taken a more fateful turn when the
Ministry of Justice turned them over to the Ministry of Interior, the notorious fiefdom
of Maliki’s Daʿwa Party and the Badr Organization, an Iran-created fighting force that
became and remains part of Iraq’s new security apparatus.32 It is unclear when the files
were transferred, but it seems to have occurred after the conclusion of the Anfal trials in
2010 when Maliki began ardently pursuing the restitution of the seized records from the
2003 war. Their transfer to the Interior Ministry would have made them fully accessible
to the sectarian-driven militias and their Iranian patrons.33
Members of the Badr Organization, for example, worked with Iranian intelligence in
hunting down former Baʿthist pilots and carried out some of the worst sectarian violence
against Sunnis in the 2006–2008 civil war, much of it in broad daylight while wearing
Interior Ministry uniforms. US troops could identify the sect of the victims based on how
7
they were tortured and killed—those who were beheaded were Shiʿites and the corpses with
drill holes through their eyes, ears, and knees were Sunnis.34 It is a reasonable assumption
that the militias’ sadistic and vengeful zealotry would have motivated them to scour the
trove of files to identify and target sectarian adversaries. The repatriation of the Baʿthist state
records first seized by the Kurds in 1991 has thus been—while opaque—anything but benign
in both the Iraqi Kurdistan region and Baghdad.35
Seizure of the Baʿthist State Archives in the 2003 War

The political exploitation of the 1991 Baʿth Party and secret police files by the PUK,
KDP, and Shiʿite militias anticipated the Maliki regime’s acute interest in retrieving
the Saddam-regime documents seized in the 2003 war. The US seizure of the Baʿthist
documents in the invasion of Iraq set off a struggle for the files as various Iraqi and foreign
parties vied to control, use, or malignly exploit Saddam’s legacy of atrocity. Those who
aimed to put the documents to humanitarian use—to expose Iraqis to their authoritarian
past in the name of reconciliation and the rule of law, or to find missing relatives—had to
contend with both the US military and the pervasive forces of sectarian retribution.
Nevertheless, the US had captured the overwhelming majority of the Baʿthist archives in
the war for intelligence purposes and held the highly incriminating records for a decade
before returning them to a volatile and paranoid Iraqi regime bent on sectarian revenge.
The events surrounding the seizure, restitution, and exploitation of the Saddam-regime files
revealed both the erroneous rationale for the invasion as well as Iraq’s social and political
unrest and subsequent disintegration into sectarian violence.
The US military captured the records of Saddam’s regime in the 2003 invasion in the urgent
hunt for evidence of unconventional weapons and ties to al-Qaeda terrorist networks—the
motives for the war. US document exploitation units had swept across Iraq, seizing millions
of state security files from Saddam’s palaces, government ministries, military installations,
and other sites—constituting the largest seizure of enemy documents since World War II.
After the exploitation teams analyzed the captured records in the field for any actionable
intelligence, they were transferred to the DIA’s Combined Media Processing Center’s
Document Exploitation (DOCEX) facility at the headquarters of the US military’s Central
Command in Doha, Qatar.36
The DIA had quickly staffed the Qatar facility with more than five hundred linguists, analysts,
and technicians to triage, screen, digitize, and produce rough English translations of
the files of interest, uploading them into the Department of Defense’s shared Harmony
database to maximize their analysis. In so doing, the DIA’s staff strove to rapidly process
more than seven linear miles of captured documents and media in various formats.37 Despite
the enormous volume of material, analyses of the records quickly revealed telling absences.
Charles Duelfer, project leader at the Qatar media processing center, notes, “Unfortunately,

8
there seemed to be some gaps in the types of Mukhabarat [intelligence service] documents
obtained—for example, concerning Iraqi operations in Iran. The United States was not
always the first to get to important Iraqi document archives.”38 Indeed, it was no surprise
that Tehran’s intelligence services and their Iraqi allies would hasten to seize whatever
useful Baʿthist documents they could find and exploit—presaging the retribution
campaigns that helped to fuel Iraq’s fall into sectarian mayhem.39
By early 2004, the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group (ISG), comprising an international team of
1,400 experts, had interviewed and interrogated Iraqi scientists and officials, dispatched
search teams to scour the countryside for weapons sites, and analyzed millions of
documents seized in the war. Nevertheless, the ISG repeatedly came up empty-handed,
intensifying political criticism of the George W. Bush administration’s war narrative.40 The
seized documents also became entangled in the political crossfire over the war in 2006
when, in opposition to the intelligence agencies, the White House sanctioned an ill-fated
effort to produce evidence of Saddam’s active unconventional weapons program and
operational ties to al-Qaeda. The project involved crowdsourcing the raw documents,
without contextual analysis, on the internet with the hope of enlisting the assistance of
legions of eager amateur researchers conversant in Arabic.41 A former CIA counterterrorism
specialist scoffed at the document free-for-all, likening it to “putting firearms in the hands
of children.” The project went awry and was abruptly terminated after several posted
documents revealed detailed technical information on Iraq’s unconventional weapons
programs before the 1990–91 Gulf War.42
The seized records held more importance for understanding the background to the war and
the nature of Saddam’s dictatorship. Seeking to expand their immediate value for wartime
intelligence, the Pentagon initiated a research project to study the documents to glean
lessons from the 2003 military campaign.43 The fall of Baghdad in April 2003 had opened
to outside examination one of the twentieth century’s most secretive and ruthless regimes.
In addition to interviewing former Baʿthist political and military officials, the Pentagon
sponsored researchers to probe the records to understand the Saddam regime’s strategic
political and military calculations.44 The initiative produced a series of insightful studies
relating to the perspectives of Iraqi generals, the Iraqi plan of battle in 2003, the audio
recordings of meetings between Saddam and his advisors, the Iraqi military perspectives
on both the Iran–Iraq and first Gulf wars, as well as the Saddam regime’s ties to terrorist
groups.45
The Defense Department also created the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) to foster
social science research into declassified digital documents and audio files captured in
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.46 The CRRC was launched in 2010 as a digital research
archive in a few windowless rooms at the National Defense University in Washington, DC.
The center derived the digital files from the Harmony database with the aim of making
them available to civilian scholars and researchers. The CRRC recalled the post–World War II
9
effort by the US government and the American Historical Association to declassify and
open for public study the records and archives seized from Hitler’s Third Reich.47 The center
drew increasing numbers of scholars to study and research the captured Baʿthist documents
before Defense cuts terminated its operations and impelled the repatriation of the original
records back to Iraq.48
By the time the CRRC was shuttered in June 2015, the center had processed, indexed, and
translated approximately 143,000 pages of digital documents, a mere fraction of the totality
of the seized records. The center’s collections were then returned to join the remaining
millions of pages of digitized records in the US government’s Harmony database—which is
unavailable to researchers and beyond the reach of FOIA requests. As nonfederal records, the
digital Iraqi files could not be deemed “classified” under US law, but their status as captured
adversary documents allowed the Pentagon to restrict their public availability. The CRRC,
however, currently awaits transfer to a civilian academic institution.49
With the Pentagon controlling the original documents and opening digital copies for public
study, Iraqi officials began demanding the restitution of their national history under the
Baʿthist dictatorship. The campaign was initially led by Saad Eskander, a Feyli Kurd who
had joined the Kurdish Peshmerga in 1981 to fight Saddam’s forces in the mountains of
Iraqi Kurdistan in northern Iraq. He later went into exile in Iran and Syria, then moved
to London in 1991, where he earned a doctorate in history from the London School of
Economics. Eskander worked as a researcher at the Iraqi Cultural Forum in London before
joining other Iraqi expatriate intellectuals and exiled artists in returning to Iraq after the
invasion to rebuild the country’s cultural life.50 One month after arriving in Baghdad, he
accepted the position of director general at the Iraq National Library and Archive (INLA).
For Eskander, restoring and preserving Iraq’s cultural patrimony was vital for the country’s
future social and political stability. “Without cultural education,” he explained, “we cannot
emerge from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship properly. Without it, we cannot resist the ideas
of religious fundamentalism.”51
Amid Baghdad’s worsening sectarian violence, including car bombs and assassinations,
Eskander worked with meager resources as he solicited international aid to rebuild the INLA
after looters and arsonists raided and torched many of its priceless holdings.52 He envisioned
retrieving the seized Saddam-era documents to preserve the history of Baʿthist dictatorial
rule and foster reconciliation, democracy, and the rule of law in the new Iraq.53 His demands
for the return of the documents to the INLA ran into conflict with the Pentagon as well as
with Kanan Makiya and the IMF.
Makiya was an influential voice in the humanitarian argument for the 2003 Iraq War;
he often met in the Oval Office with President George W. Bush.54 He had first gained
the attention of US foreign policy makers more than a decade earlier. His 1989 book,
Republic of Fear, quickly became a bestseller following Saddam’s invasion and occupation

10
of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Originally published under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil,
the book portrayed Iraq’s pervasive brutality and paranoia under Saddam’s reign of terror,
which had been modeled after the murderous totalitarian ideologies of twentieth-century
Europe—the Nazis, fascists, and communists.55 Makiya had urged the George H. W. Bush
administration to stop Saddam’s slaughter of the predominantly Shiʿite Arabs and Kurds
in their uprisings in southern and northern Iraq following Iraq’s ignominious defeat in
Kuwait. He also exhorted the US-led coalition to march on Baghdad to overthrow Baʿthist
rule.56 The war and the mass killings of Iraqi Shiʿites and Kurds—including the earlier Anfal
(predominantly Kurdish) genocide—set Makiya on a new path in the 1990s to document
Saddam’s dictatorial rule, leading him to form the IMF shortly before the 2003 US-led
invasion of Iraq.57 In creating the IMF, Makiya recruited the assistance of two cofounders:
Hassan Mneimneh, who served as IMF director from 2004 to 2008, and Mustafa al-Kadhimi,
who became prime minister of Iraq in 2020.58
Registered as an NGO in Washington, DC, and Baghdad, the IMF entered Iraq as a defense
contractor soon after the invasion to collect and preserve the artifacts and documents of the
Baʿth’s oppressive rule. Makiya aimed to build a memorial center in the heart of Baghdad
similar to Germany’s Stasi Records Archive or the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington. He envisioned the memorial center standing as an enduring indictment
of Saddam’s carnage and the terrible toll it took on Iraq and its people. He also believed
that exposing Iraqis to their past would help foster transitional justice and national
reconciliation as in Czechoslovakia and East Germany after the fall of communism,
or South Africa following the end of apartheid.59
In April 2003, one month after the invasion, a US Army civil affairs officer led Makiya to his
most dramatic find—nearly 6.5 million pages of documents beneath a trap door of the tomb
of Michel Aflaq—one of the founders of the Baʿth Party in Damascus, Syria, in the early
1940s.60 The archive of the Baʿth Party Regional Command offered the view from the top,
revealing the interactions of the ruling elite with the provincial branches, the party and
state security agencies, and the Presidential Diwan. There was arguably no greater find of
primary sources documenting the Baʿth Party’s rule in Iraq.
The IMF had assumed custody of the forty-eight tons of records with the approval of
the US occupation authorities and the Iraqi interim government. Nonetheless, Makiya
and the IMF abandoned their memorial project amid the outbreak of sectarian civil
war and armed insurrection against the US occupation. Alarmed that the archive might
be destroyed in the spiraling violence, Makiya and his associates had initially hoped
the Pentagon would fly the documents to the vast media storage center in Doha, Qatar,
where the previously captured Baʿthist records were being processed. However, due to the
anticipated delay in clearing Qatari customs and the backlog at the Doha processing facility,
Defense officials arranged in 2005 to airlift the records to the US pursuant to an agreement
with the IMF.61
11
The agreement came after Makiya convinced Defense officials of the intelligence value
of the Baʿth Regional Command archive in understanding the Sunni Arab insurgency
in central and western Iraq. The “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU), executed on
February 2, 2005, was signed by IMF Vice President Hassan Mneimneh and Special Assistant
to the Office of the Secretary of Defense Doman (Dobie) O. McArthur. The MOU outlined the
IMF’s intelligence role in analyzing the files, providing that it would “assist and advise
the USG [United States Government] in devising efficient, productive methodologies for
successful classification, annotation, and extractions of useful, real-time information from
the Foundation documents for purposes of interest to the USG.”62
After the US military airlifted the archive to safety in the US, it was transferred to a
West Virginia naval facility where DIA contractors digitized the records. In keeping with
the MOU, the files were also uploaded into the Harmony database, after which the originals
were handed back to the IMF.63 Then, in January 2008, Makiya and the IMF arranged
to place the archive at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University under a temporary
deposit agreement that acknowledged its status as Iraqi patrimony.64
The IMF-Hoover agreement incited allegations of pillage among several Iraqi officials, as
well as a chorus of archivists, librarians, and academics in and outside Iraq. As the leading
Iraqi critic against the taking of the Saddam-regime files, Eskander campaigned for the
return of all the documents in the hands of the Pentagon and the IMF. In November 2007,
he traveled to the US—which he later criticized as “the hungriest scavenger” of other
nations’ archives—to lobby for their restitution to Baghdad.65 He found a receptive audience
among academics, archivists, and museum officials in recognition of his efforts to rebuild
the INLA amid Iraq’s post-2003 chaos and spiraling sectarian violence. Indeed, that same
year the Middle East Studies Association, an American scholarly society, gave Eskander its
Academic Freedom Award to a standing ovation at its annual meeting in Montreal.66
Although the IMF-Hoover agreement had received the blessing of the Iraqi prime minister’s
office, academic critics and archivists joined Eskander in denouncing the US seizure of
the Saddam regime’s documents and the IMF-Hoover deal as acts of cultural plunder under
international law. On April 22, 2008, the Society of American Archivists and the Association
of Canadian Archivists issued a joint statement condemning the agreement as a possible
“act of pillage” and calling for the immediate repatriation to Iraq of all documents held
by US institutions.67 Others countered that the US had seized the documents under the
laws of war, warning of the human rights risks in returning them to a vengeful regime
amid Iraq’s sectarian civil war.68 In the latter view, repatriating the poisonous documents
into the hands of an Iraqi regime, whose ministries and security forces had been heavily
infiltrated by death squads bent on sectarian vengeance, only promised to incite further
bloodshed.69 The question was not whether the seized documents should be returned,
but when and under what circumstances—so as to minimize the risk of their political or
sectarian exploitation for blackmail, revenge, or extrajudicial killings. At the same time,

12
behind closed doors, US officials and many Iraqi officials also shared concerns about Iraq’s
institutional capacity to handle the documents.
Amid the escalating controversy, in April 2010 a three-member Iraqi delegation, including

Eskander, visited California and Washington to meet with officials from the Hoover Institution,
Pentagon, and State Department. It was the first time, Eskander said, that Iraq demanded
the return of all the Baʿthist documents removed from the country by the US.70 Although
the meetings failed to yield their immediate repatriation, they set the course for the
diplomatic discussions to come.
More than a year later, on October 24, 2011, the Hoover Institution received a high-level
visit from Iraq’s national security advisor, Falih al-Fayyadh, to discuss the Baʿth Regional
Command archive. In addition to serving as national security advisor since 2011, Fayyadh
had held other key national security and intelligence positions. Fayyadh’s two-day visit
indicated the Maliki regime’s ardent desire to retrieve the seized documents from the
2003 war. Fayyadh met with staff “to review and discuss current and future cooperation
between the Iraqi government and the Hoover Institution.”71 In his additional capacity as
Iraq’s director of national reconciliation, Fayyadh quietly became the “Baʿthist documents
czar.” Over the next year and a half, he led Iraq’s discreet discussions with officials at the
US embassy in Baghdad concerning the repatriation of the seized Saddam-regime records
held by the DIA in Doha. Fayyadh’s personal involvement suggests that Maliki’s regime was
more interested in retrieving the archival trove for its incriminating intelligence on former
Baʿthists than it was in reclaiming Iraq’s historical patrimony so as to expose Iraqis to their
authoritarian past and advance national reconciliation.
The Budget Sequester

Fayyadh’s visit to Hoover came just days after President Obama announced the withdrawal
of the last remaining thirty-nine thousand troops from Iraq. While Iraq thereafter spiraled
into growing authoritarianism, renewed sectarian conflict, and state failure, the repatriation
discussions regarding the seized records from the 2003 war gained momentum. For the US,
the talks also were driven by the “Sequester,” a series of mandated federal spending cuts
designed to tame a surging deficit resulting from the Great Recession.72 Initially passed as
part of the Budget Control Act of 2011, the measure aimed to incentivize the Joint Select
Committee on Deficit Reduction to reach agreement on the deficit by December 23, 2011.73
But the efforts to strike a deficit deal failed, triggering spending cuts across federal agencies,
including the Pentagon, starting on March 1, 2013.74 With the Iraq War over and in search
of discretionary cuts, the Defense Department targeted the Combined Media Processing
Center in Doha, where the DIA was storing the records seized in 2003. According to one
source, after the US government fully exploited the records for intelligence and analysis
of the war, DIA officials concluded, “We really didn’t need this stuff anymore. It was just
13
sitting in the warehouse taking up space.”75 The exorbitant costs of renting and storing the
documents in an air-conditioned warehouse amid the heat and humidity of the Persian
Gulf region, and the “desire to return to Iraq what the US military had removed from
Iraq after 2003,” were contributing factors behind the repatriation, according to several
sources.76
The Pentagon enlisted the State Department’s assistance in expediting the diplomatic
talks with Iraq to unload the millions of pages of documents and shut down the storage
facility.77 After some interdepartmental haggling, the State Department also agreed to cover
the costs of repatriating the documents. A chagrined Pentagon source recounted one of his
associates “openly bragging about getting State to foot the bill”—indifferent to the human
rights risks of returning the poisonous records to a sectarian regime in an increasingly
unstable country.78
On September 2, 2012, the State Department issued a press release, reconfirming the
US-Iraq strategic partnership and noting the “ongoing process of repatriating archives and
documents” to the Iraqi government.79 In Iraq, Ambassador Robert S. Beecroft (2012–2014)
and Deputy Chief of Mission Douglas A. Silliman handled the restitution talks with Fayyadh
and his associates at the US embassy in Baghdad.80 At the logistical level, the talks were
driven by the DIA, which was managing the documents at the media processing center in
Qatar and would be responsible for carrying out their repatriation. “The ‘negotiations’ were
not really a traditional negotiation,” recalled one participant in the talks. “They were more
a series of discussions with Iraqi officials about this issue and working out how and when
they would be returned to Iraq. The documents were in the possession of the Department
of Defense, so, as I recall, it was DoD that approved the return.”81
The high-level involvement of Beecroft, Silliman, and Fayyadh, however, indicated that
the repatriation involved a sensitive diplomatic matter. It is likely that Fayyadh wanted
to keep the restitution quiet to avoid alerting either the Sunni Arab political elites or the
Daʿwa Party’s Shiʿite Islamist and Kurdish political rivals, many of whom may have been
named in the files. Fayyadh’s preeminence in Iraq’s national security apparatus and his
central role in the repatriation talks signified the Maliki regime’s determination to retrieve
the documents.
US Covertly Returns the Seized Records in 2013

By late April 2013, after Fayyadh, Beecroft, and Silliman had concluded their talks, the
Pentagon’s lawyers drafted the repatriation agreement. The agreement was based on the
restitution pact with West Germany, which had demanded the return of its national history
shortly after World War II. In a show of diplomatic good will with its new post-war ally, from
1953 to 1968 the US repatriated most of the seized records and archives of the Third Reich,
dating back though the Weimar Republic to the Second Reich of Otto von Bismarck.82

14
The US nevertheless withheld files relating to national security, the glorification of the
Nazi regime, or the occupation of foreign states.83
The Iraq repatriation agreement incorporated the same terminology, deeming the return
of the records as a “donation” and “gift.” This wording acknowledged that the captured
records constituted US property under the laws of war, including the right to withhold
selected documents on national security grounds. In the Iraq case, the US withheld files
concerning Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs in the 1980s and
early 1990s.84 Moreover, the agreement covered the restitution of only the seized files from
the 2003 war held in Doha, which excluded the DIA’s database of the digitized documents,
as well as the Baʿth Regional Command archive deposited at the Hoover Institution by
the IMF.
With the pro forma agreement in hand, on April 22, 2013, the US embassy in Baghdad
sent a diplomatic note to the Iraqi government: “The Embassy of the United States of
America presents its compliments to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of
Iraq and wishes to inform that Customs clearance is required for a diplomatic shipment.”
According to the note, the shipment was exempt from customs duty and tax and would be
arriving in Iraq through the Umm Qasr border point.85
Several weeks later, on May 16, 2013, the Al-Rumelia, carrying a diplomatic shipment
of 35,504 boxes of Saddam-regime records, arrived at the port of Umm Qasr.86 The
documents were returned in roughly the same disorganized state in which they were
seized in the chaos and confusion of the 2003 invasion.87 The packing inventory listed
the shipment’s net weight at 526,220 kilograms (1,160,116.52 pounds) and its gross weight
at 532,560 kilograms (1,174,093.82 pounds).88 The shipping receipt and “Relinquishment
of Possession” document transferring responsibility for the records to Iraq were signed by
Fayyadh and US Ambassador to Iraq Beecroft.89
Other documents dating to April and May, before the repatriation, indicated that the
documents, exceeding 580 tons, were destined for the “Embassy of the United States of America
in the International Zone, Baghdad.”90 This designation may have concerned nothing more
than the customs process. Alternatively, it may have provided diplomatic cover for discreetly
returning the files to Maliki’s regime.
Both Washington and Baghdad kept the repatriation of the Baʿthist state files under
wraps, despite the widespread media attention given to their seizure in the war and what
they revealed about the inner workings of Saddam’s regime.91 US officials were aware
that returning the files to Maliki’s increasingly repressive and sectarian regime could
considerably inflame Iraq’s sectarian and political violence. In response to questions
about whether US officials discussed the risks of repatriating the documents amid Iraq’s
intensifying sectarianism and social unrest, a participant in the talks would only say,
15
“Any such discussions would have been classified.”92 Another US official stated that Iraqi
officials gave assurances that the documents would not be exploited, that “they wanted to
bury and forget about the stuff.”93 As Iraq descended into renewed civil war, US officials
demonstrated a remarkable indifference to the potential human rights consequences of
repatriating the documents to a sectarian-motivated regime. “I don’t think that many
people really cared,” one former US official told us.94 Another official involved in the
repatriation discussions put it more bluntly, “We decided that at a certain point, a country
has to handle its own affairs and we needed to treat the Iraqis like adults. If the Iraqis were
going to kill each other, they were going to kill each other.”95
The state security documents offered Maliki’s security services a trove of readily exploitable
intelligence for blackmail, political purges, arbitrary arrests, or revenge and extrajudicial
killings of Sunni and Shiʿite alike in a highly charged political and sectarian environment.
It was hard to imagine Maliki receiving a greater intelligence gift to exploit against his
political and sectarian enemies. Like other dictatorships have done, Saddam’s overlapping
security and intelligence agencies documented their activities and crimes in detail. The
highly sensitive files named thousands of former Baʿth Party personnel and members
of the military, secret police, intelligence agencies—as well as informants, collaborators,
and religious figures who had needed to accommodate the Baʿth Party in order to survive
in Iraq. Of likely interest would have been the names of individuals who informed on or
betrayed the Daʿwa Party when it was the main underground opposition party battling
Saddam’s regime.
The US returned the documents at a decidedly ill-fated time, just as the Syrian uprising
was merging with the growing unrest in Iraq. In April 2013, the leader of the metastasizing
cross-border insurgency, the black-clad terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had declared the
theocratic militant movement under his command as the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham.96
Weeks later, the day preceding the repatriation, a leading military and security affairs analyst
warned of Iraq’s disintegration in an article titled “Yes, Iraq Is Unraveling.”97 One year
later, the lightning advance of ISIS across northern Iraq and the fall of Mosul in June 2014
compelled a reluctant President Obama to order troops back to Iraq under Operation
Inherent Resolve. With the fall of Mosul, Maliki’s regime fell into disarray, leading him
to step down as prime minister under heavy US pressure.98
Delivering the Files into Authoritarian Hands

Repatriating the incriminating files into the hands of Maliki’s security chief, Fayyadh, augured
their malignant misuse. Fayyadh and Maliki held long-standing personal vendettas
against the former Baʿthists. As early acolytes of the persecuted Shiʿite Daʿwa Party, both had
suffered grievously under Saddam’s regime, instilling in them an abiding sense of vengeance.
Fayyadh had been arrested shortly after joining the Daʿwa Party in the early 1970s; he
spent five years in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison before Saddam ordered his release

16
after a meeting over coffee with Fayyadh’s tribal leader.99 Saddam’s release order included
Fayyadh’s brother as well, but it arrived too late to save him from execution.100
Fayyadh’s sectarian vendetta melded with his pro-Iranian politics, which became
increasingly evident after the US withdrew its troops from Iraq in 2011. Fayyadh and his
former deputy, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, had nominally led the Popular Mobilization
Forces (PMF), which were formed in June 2014 after ISIS routed the Iraqi army in Mosul.
The PMF comprised an umbrella group of various competing militias largely dominated
by conservative Islamists armed and supported by Tehran.101 Muhandis had also served
as an advisor to General Qassim Suleimani, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard’s
Quds Force. In 2009, the US Treasury sanctioned Muhandis for his ties to Suleimani
and Hezbollah, posing a threat to the stability of Iraq.102 Both Muhandis and Suleimani
were later killed outside Baghdad International Airport on January 3, 2020, in a drone
strike ordered by President Donald J. Trump.103 Among Fayyadh’s network of pro-Iranian
associates was Hadi al-Amiri, leader of the Iranian-backed Badr organization and one of
Iraq’s most sectarian figures.104 Fayyadh’s next-door neighbor was Qais al-Khazali, leader
of the pro-Iranian militia Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (League of the Righteous), which had launched
hundreds of attacks on US troops starting with the 2003 war.105 Given Fayyadh’s personal
vendetta against former Baʿthists, involvement with pro-Iranian militias, and control
over the repatriation discussions with US officials, it is more than a fair wager that the
security services fully exploited the files against the Sunni Arab elites. “It’s a pretty good
assumption,” said a highly respected former diplomat with extensive experience in Iraq,
“that if Falih al-Fayyadh had custody of the documents, they were used for sectarian
purposes.”106
Prime Minister Maliki, who appointed Fayyadh national security advisor in January 2011,
was likewise driven by sectarian and pro-Iranian politics. Few Iraqi politicians aimed to
exact sectarian retribution more than Maliki, who was fixated on cleansing Sunni Arab
political elites from the government and seeding the intelligence agencies with Shiʿite
Islamist loyalists in the name of preventing the return of the Baʿth Party.107 His background
shows that he too would have been strongly inclined to exploit the repatriated documents
against his sectarian enemies and political rivals, real and imagined.
Maliki was born and raised in a devout Shiʿite family in the village of Tuwairji, outside the
Iraqi holy city of Karbala. Maliki joined the Daʿwa Party in his youth, drawn by its call to
replace secular Baʿthist rule with an Islamist government in Iraq. Saddam banned the rival
party, declared membership a capital crime, and accused the Daʿwa Islamists of serving
the interests of Iranian clerics and intelligence services; he arrested, tortured, and executed
thousands of its members and their relatives.
The records of Saddam’s regime detail numerous executions of Daʿwa Party members and
the punishment of their families.108 Some of Maliki’s close relatives were killed in the purges.
17
For more than thirty years, Maliki devoted himself to organizing covert operations against
Saddam’s regime from bases in Iran and Syria, eventually becoming head of Iraq’s Daʿwa
branch in Damascus. In the 1980s, during the Iran–Iraq war, the Daʿwa Party served as
one of Iran’s Shiʿite proxies, bombing the Iraqi embassy in Beirut and the US and French
embassies in Kuwait.109
Following the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, Maliki returned to the country and was elected to
the new parliament. He chaired the committee supporting the De-Baʿthification Commission,
which was used by Shiʿite Islamists to purge the Iraqi government and its security apparatus
of former members of Saddam’s Baʿth Party. Despite his violent history with the secretive
Daʿwa Party, Maliki leveraged his support from US officials to become prime minister in
May 2006. US officials had considered Maliki the only option among Iraq’s political elite who
could potentially draw support from Iraq’s various factions, subdue the pro-Iranian Shiʿite
militias, battle al-Qaeda in Iraq, and forge a semblance of national unity. As Maliki stepped
into the prime minister’s post, he vowed to form a strong, united Iraq—while it was rapidly
descending into sectarian civil war and ethnic cleansing.110
Driven by his own Baʿthist paranoia and distrust, however, Maliki demonstrated a fervor
for retribution and authoritarianism. Although the US military stood solidly behind his
prime-ministerial rule amid the sectarian violence that was killing thousands each month
and displacing millions, Maliki linked his own personal and political survival to the coercive
forces of the state.111 The exigencies of the civil war gave the new prime minister latitude to
begin seizing personal control over the security services, seeding them with Shiʿite loyalists
and arresting, purging, and assassinating—with Tehran’s assistance—numerous former
Baʿthist intelligence operatives, many of whom were recruited by the CIA to rebuild Iraq’s
intelligence and security apparatus.112
Nevertheless, under US pressure Maliki reluctantly yielded to the 2007 surge and the
arming and funding of Sunni tribal and former Baʿthist insurgents to turn their weapons
on al-Qaeda in Iraq, which had recently proclaimed itself the Islamic State in Iraq.113 The
Anbar Awakening’s Sons of Iraq movement proved successful in subduing much of the
Sunni Arab insurgency, but Maliki later betrayed his promises to keep the tribal fighters on
the payroll.114 The betrayal left members of the movement jobless, embittered, and inclined
toward radicalization—as well as vulnerable to attacks by the resurgent Islamic State over the
next several years.115
In 2008, with the incoming Obama administration pledging to end the war, and distracted by
the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression, Maliki moved to tighten his grip
on power and ramp up sectarian retribution, laying the foundations for another civil war.116
According to Ali Khedery—former special assistant to various US ambassadors and senior
advisor to the US Central Command from 2003 to 2009—Maliki “began a systematic campaign
to destroy the Iraqi state and replace it with his private office and his political party.”117

18
After the failed negotiations over the Status of Forces Agreement resulted in the last
US troops leaving Iraq in December 2011, Maliki’s systematic campaign involved
unleashing his loyalist security forces—along with rounding up numerous individuals
among the Arab Sunni elites in order to cleanse every vestige of their influence from the
government.118 The prime minister’s sectarian purges and intensified efforts to subjugate
the political, security, and judicial branches of the state—while expanding his political
patronage at the expense of his rivals—inflamed Iraq’s growing disorder.
By early 2013, Maliki’s autocratic sectarianism was inciting mass protests in the predominantly
Sunni Arab regions of Iraq over government neglect, marginalization, the arrest and
torture of thousands, and the killing of hundreds by Maliki’s security services.119 While
Maliki’s sectarian regime purged Sunni Arab elites from power and violently confronted
the anti-government protests, stoking sectarian tension and armed opposition, Fayyadh
was carrying out restitution talks with US officials at the US embassy in Baghdad. Just
months later in May, after the signing of a repatriation agreement, the Pentagon returned
the politically explosive records of Saddam’s regime into the hands of Fayyadh and the
security services.
No Comment
Following the covert return of the Saddam-regime documents into the hands of Maliki’s
security services, US officials stopped tracking the documents’ whereabouts.120 Iraq’s political
class was kept in the dark, including the parliament, which passed legislation in 2006
and 2016 related to the historical records of the former Baʿthist state.121 In the years after
the 2013 repatriation, Iraqi officials made frequent inquiries to the US government about
the status of the archives of Saddam’s regime, believing they were still held in Doha. One
US official who received many of these inquiries commented, “Nobody seems to know
where the documents are in Iraq.”122
Iraqi sources have since said the files have remained in Iraq, including a high-level
intelligence official who noted that the “documents were delivered to a team effort by
several government departments who are in charge of their safekeeping.”123 Other Iraqi
sources, however, have cast doubt on this claim, believing that the records were transferred
to Iran—a plausible scenario given the infiltration of Iraq’s security services by pro-Iranian
militias armed, funded, and directed by Tehran. An independent Iraqi researcher enlisted
the help of a handful of Iraqi employees across several ministries with the aim of locating
the files. After making inquiries the employees quickly grew fearful for their personal safety
and the investigation was abruptly halted.
The covert repatriation, moreover, remained concealed from Mustafa al-Kadhimi, who was
director of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service from June 2016 until his appointment
19
as prime minister in May 2020 but did not have an official government capacity in 2013.
According to sources, Prime Minister Kadhimi and his aides still have little intimation
of what happened to the records; they may remain beyond the premier’s reach and in the
hands of pro-Iranian militias or Iranian intelligence.124 Although a US State Department
official claims there is no evidence that any of the repatriated documents was misused, it
is more than likely, given Fayyadh’s high-level involvement in the restitution, that the
security services led the “team effort,” perhaps with Iranian assistance, in exploiting the
files for sectarian purposes or Iranian benefit.125
One of the former Obama officials asked about the 2013 repatriation was Brett McGurk,
who was a key advisor on Iraqi affairs before becoming deputy secretary of state for Iraq
in August 2013. Commenting on the repatriation, McGurk would only say, “It definitely
would have come across my desk.” He declined further comment, referring additional
questions to the State Department.126 McGurk has come under some disparaging criticism
for his role as the Obama administration’s so-called chief “Maliki whisperer.”127 While his
reticence in discussing the repatriation indicates its continuing sensitivity, it also raises
questions regarding how much McGurk knows about what Maliki’s security services did
with the documents. Washington and Baghdad have their evident reasons for keeping the
repatriation shrouded in secrecy. Given McGurk’s high-level diplomatic role in the Obama
administration, he may know whether Maliki’s regime abused the files or allowed Iranian
intelligence to exploit them—to the detriment of Iraq’s social and political stability. If the
files were abused, his whisperer influence with Maliki was less than he thought. At the very
least, McGurk and other former and current officials could be cast in a critical light if it
became known that Maliki and his security services had either allowed Iranian intelligence
to exploit the files or transferred them to Tehran.
Another former Obama administration official who, like McGurk, is now serving in the
administration of President Joseph R. Biden, confirmed hearing about the repatriation
but did not have direct knowledge of the operation.128 A Pentagon official responsible
for Middle Eastern affairs at the time did not recall working on the issue, which suggests
that perhaps the Pentagon delegated the matter to its own lawyers and the DIA.129 If so, the
highest-ranking Pentagon official to sign off on the repatriation of the documents to Iraq
would likely have been either Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, who was the DIA director
from July 2012 to August 2014, or his deputy David Shedd. Attempts to reach Flynn through
his lawyers proved unsuccessful, and Shedd did not reply to an email request for comment.
Moreover, email inquiries went unanswered by former deputy secretary of defense
Ashton B. Carter and former under secretary of defense for policy James N. Miller, both of
whom were serving in the Pentagon when the records were clandestinely repatriated in 2013.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of
State, and US Central Command all declined to comment for this article through official

20
public affairs channels. Several Iraqi officials also declined requests to comment on the subject.
The covert repatriation of the documents and the reluctance of officials to comment on
the record suggest, at minimum, concerns about how Maliki’s regime used or misused the
documents while Iraq was falling into another civil war in 2013 and 2014. Moreover, the
leak in November 2019 of secret Iranian intelligence documents detailing Iran’s pervasive
infiltration of nearly every aspect of Iraq’s political, economic, and religious life raises the
question of whether Tehran’s intelligence services also exploited the files against former
Baʿthist political and state security officials in order to advance its aim of transforming Iraq
into a client state.130
Some current and former US officials suggest that Iraq’s dysfunction, lack of state capacity,
and disintegration into another sectarian conflict likely prevented Maliki’s security services
from exploiting the documents, but this scenario seems improbable. Even if one were to
accept this premise, Fayyadh could have easily mobilized a “team effort” comprising one or
two hundred low-level loyalists and Shiʿite militia members, or solicited Iranian intelligence
to help scour the thousands of boxes for incriminating information. The Maliki regime may
have been Balkanized, dysfunctional, corrupt, and beset by weak institutions, but these
factors would not have prevented his security services from abusing the files and exposing
them to Iranian intelligence.
Archival Politics
Among the many casualties of Iraq’s pervasive corruption was Saad Eskander, the former
director general of the INLA. Eskander had initiated the campaign to retrieve the
Saddam-regime documents held by both the IMF and the US military, drawing support
among US and Western academics, archivists, and others. However well-intentioned
these advocates and critics were in calling for the immediate repatriation of the archives
of Saddam’s regime, they misunderstood Iraq’s violent sectarian politics and naively
believed that Eskander and the INLA would be the recipients of the documents.
None of the Saddam-regime files was ever destined for Iraq’s archives or other cultural
institutions. Even as late as February 2020, for example, then minister of culture, tourism,
and antiquities Abd al-Amir al-Hamdani was still in the dark about the repatriation
of the Anfal files—which had transpired fifteen years earlier—when he erroneously
announced that they were “present in North Carolina” and would be returned to
Iraq in 2021.131 A former US official noted that the US government considered the INLA
unsuitable to house the documents because it lacked institutional capacity and security.
The source believed that the most realistic option involved delivering the records directly
to the government, despite the serious risks. “The thing you need to know about the Iraqi
government,” he stated, “is that it is ineffective and highly Balkanized. . . . The Iraqis had
huge records-management problems. There was a substantial chance the records would be
lost or even destroyed.”132
21
Nonetheless, US officials had little interest in dictating what the Iraqis should do with the
repatriated files or where they should go in Iraq. What for Maliki and his security services
had been an ardent pursuit, the unloading of the seized records was for the Pentagon merely
a small line-item budget cut. Indeed, it was improbable that Eskander and the INLA could
have withstood the corruption of Iraq’s political class and the powerful interests of the
security services and the Iranian-backed militias—all vying to assert control over the files
and exploit them against sectarian adversaries.
In May 2015, Eskander made the following announcement on Facebook: “I’d like to inform
you,” he writes, “that corrupt elements within the hierarchy of the ministry of culture have
been able to force me out of my post with the help of the new minister, who is an ignorant
and arrogant person. . . . My staff wanted to resist the Minister’s decision, but I discouraged
the idea, as I did not want them to be hurt.”133 Eskander’s ouster largely fell on deaf ears
among academics and archivists abroad—figures who had previously showered him with
accolades for his work in rebuilding the INLA and campaigning to reclaim the seized
archives of Saddam’s regime. After leaving Baghdad, Eskander moved to Sulaymaniyah,
where he advised the Kurdistan Parliament on the establishment of a future Kurdish
national library and archive.134
His politically motivated deposing belied the hope that Iraq would govern the documents by
the rule of law—like the Stasi archives in Germany had been—in the service of human rights,
reconciliation, and public understanding of the country’s authoritarian past.135 Eskander’s
vision for the documents never had a chance amid Iraq’s fall into renewed sectarianism and
civil conflict. Eskander’s later return as an advisor to the ministry of culture after Kadhimi
became prime minister in May 2020 signifies, perhaps, a glimmer of hope.
The Last Baʿthist Documents in the United States

By the time of Eskander’s 2015 dismissal, the US had returned most of the Saddam-regime
files to Iraq. The tons of Baʿth Party and secret police records seized by the Kurds in the
1991 uprising had been returned in 2005 for the Anfal genocide trials of Saddam and
his henchmen. More than seven years later, in 2013, the US returned the vast trove of
captured records from the 2003 war, stored in Doha, to Maliki’s regime. Only the Baʿth
Regional Command archive held by the Hoover Institution remained to be repatriated.
Like Eskander, the Hoover Institution and the IMF had been kept in the dark by the US
and Iraqi governments with respect to the talks and repatriation of the records from Doha.
The 2013 repatriation and its aftershocks nevertheless likely informed the caution and
concern that attended the eventual return of the Baʿth Regional Command records in
2020. The archive had remained in the Hoover Institution’s custody for twelve years. Its
restitution had been impeded by the outbreak of renewed civil conflict from 2013 to 2019,
when the ISIS territorial caliphate was finally destroyed. Amid the conflict and sharp

22
decline in the global price of oil, the Iraqi government informed US officials that it could
not cover the cost of shipping the documents back to Iraq—putting the onus on the US to
foot the bill.136 Nevertheless, Iraqi officials supported Hoover’s continuing custodianship of
the records; indeed, Iraqi Ambassador Lukman Faily participated in a conference about the
documents at Stanford in June 2014.137 The archive’s repatriation also became bogged down
by a bureaucratic impasse between the State Department and the Pentagon over which
would pay to fly the archive back to Baghdad.
The interagency standoff continued for years as Defense officials shifted responsibility for
funding the archives’ return to the State Department, considering it a diplomatic matter
between Washington and Baghdad. It was the Pentagon, however, that originally authorized
the IMF as a contractor to collect the Saddam-regime documents after the 2003 invasion.
At the IMF’s behest, the Defense Department funded the transfer of the archive to the US
in 2005. The IMF-Pentagon “Memorandum of Understanding” defined the foundation as
the custodian of the records, including its role in extracting useful information from the
files that would be of interest to the US government. The State Department considered the
disposition of the archive outside the parameters of its responsibility. In 2010, for example,
Philip Frayne, spokesman for the US embassy in Baghdad, states, “This should be the subject
of discussion between Hoover, the Iraqi Memory Foundation and the Iraqi government.
In other words, they’re in the custody of the Hoover Institution right now, not in the
custody of the US government.”138
The appointment of Kadhimi to Iraq’s premiership in May 2020—following his role since

2016 as director of the National Intelligence Service—helped to break the bureaucratic impasse
between the Pentagon and State Department. Kadhimi’s pro-American inclinations and
previous experience as cofounder and director of the IMF in Baghdad helped accelerate
discussions on returning the archive to Iraq. US officials viewed the repatriation as a
low-cost goodwill gesture that would signify support for the new prime minister as he
confronted the myriad political, economic, and security challenges in Iraq.139
The US and Iraqi officials scheduled the repatriation talks for late summer 2020 as part of
their larger strategic dialogue. In June, before the strategic dialogue took place, Kadhimi
sacked Fayyadh from his post as national security advisor and related security functions,
restricting his security portfolio to the chair of the PMF.140 It is doubtful Kadhimi could
have dismissed Fayyadh from the government altogether given his base of support among
the heavily armed militias and Iran. The timing of Fayyadh’s demotion suggests that
Kadhimi aimed, among other things, to sideline him from the confidential talks—as he
was likely concerned that Fayyadh would advise the militias under his command about
the repatriation of the documents.
Fayyadh had proved an adept political survivor over the span of several post-Maliki regimes,
initially gaining the trust of US officials as a useful and “honest” source of information from
23
inside Maliki’s government. But by the time of Kadhimi’s rise as prime minister, Fayyadh
had revealed himself to be a malign proxy for Iranian interests. He had increasingly done
Iran’s bidding on a range of malevolent activities, from directing Iranian-backed militias in
the violent crackdown and killing of hundreds of Iraqis protesting government corruption
to abetting a militia attack on the US embassy in Baghdad in 2019. Fayyadh’s servitude to
Iran and unmistakable sectarianism led the US Treasury to sanction him under the Global
Magnitsky Act in 2021.141
With Fayyadh mostly out of the way, the confidential US-Iraqi discussions proceeded
swiftly with an initial restitution plan that involved conveying the documents over
several shipments aboard the State Department’s monthly COVID-19 flights to Baghdad.
Nonetheless, this arrangement posed risks that the records could still be intercepted by
the sectarian, Iranian-backed militias.142 Kadhimi’s security aides also aimed to avoid press
coverage or intelligence leaks that might tip off the militias before the documents could be
secured in Iraq.143
Considering these concerns, the Pentagon worked to expedite the return of the records
to Iraq in one shipment. Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security
Affairs Kathryn Wheelbarger, however, opposed the operation on grounds that it had little
to do with advancing US national security interests. This last bureaucratic impediment was
inadvertently resolved during Trump’s tumultuous final year in office when Wheelbarger
was ousted from her position amid allegations of insufficient loyalty to the president.144
After Wheelbarger’s departure, the records were transported from Hoover to Travis Air
Force Base in Fairfield, California. Then, on August 31, 2020, a C-5 Galaxy transport plane
covertly flew the archive back to Baghdad.145 On arrival, members of the Iraqi National
Intelligence Service immediately unloaded and transported the archive under armed guard
to a secret location. Deferring to anxious Iraqi officials, the Wall Street Journal, the first
news outlet to break the story, agreed to delay publication until midnight Baghdad time,
enabling Iraqi officials to tightly secure the records at their final undisclosed destination.146
The return of the records involved many of the same security implications as the 2013
repatriation had. Like the other stores of Saddam-regime documents repatriated to Iraq, the
Baʿth Regional Command archive included sensitive personal information on former Baʿth
Party members, secret police and intelligence agents, officers in the armed forces, informers,
and private individuals—information that could be readily exploited against political rivals
and sectarian adversaries.
Although Iraq’s political violence has subsided since the days of Maliki, major challenges
concerning human rights and the rule of law still confront the country’s political
reformers.147 Not everyone was convinced of the merits and timing of the archive’s
repatriation. Abbas Kadhim, the director of the Iraq Initiative at the Atlantic Council and
an Iraqi scholar who has studied the records, criticized the restitution. “Iraq is not ready,”

24
he states. “It has not started a process of reconciliation that would allow this archive to play
a role. . . . Baathists documented everything, from a joke to an execution. Politicians, tribal
leaders, people in the street will begin to use it against one another.”148
Concluding Remarks
The repatriation of the seized Iraqi state security records in 2013, detailed here for the
first time, has until now formed a missing chapter within the wider history of the seized
archives of Saddam Hussein’s regime. This story raises serious questions regarding the
potential for such repatriated records to be misused and exploited in ways contrary
to both humanitarian concerns and American interests, as it speaks to the tension that
sometimes exists between a state’s duty to repatriate a given country’s archival records
and the responsibility not to let those records be used to fuel retribution.
The 2013 repatriation constituted one of the largest returns of captured adversary documents
in American history, and yet the US and Iraqi governments have thus far refrained from
commenting on the transaction or even acknowledging that it took place. This wall of
silence by both governments unavoidably raises questions about the extent to which
Maliki’s regime misused the files, perhaps with Iranian complicity, against sectarian
and political adversaries—as well as the role that this may have played in creating the
conditions for the emergence of ISIS. Indeed, Maliki’s tormented past in fighting Saddam’s
murderous regime—as well as his prime-ministerial corruption, lust for power, anti-Sunni
and anti-Baʿthist paranoia, and close association with sectarian Shiʿite militias and Iranian
intelligence—strongly indicates that his security services exploited the Saddam-era files,
helping to fuel renewed sectarian civil war. The intelligence contained in the troves of
highly incriminating files would have been much too compelling to let it go to waste.
Such a likelihood would explain the unfaltering silence of the US and Iraqi governments
regarding the 2013 restitution. It would also explain the Kadhimi government’s acute
anxiety over receiving and tightly securing the Baʿth Regional Command archive in 2020.
The repatriation of the Baʿthist state files makes this matter of contemporary history a
policy issue for the current and future Iraqi government, as well as for Iraq’s parliament
and individual citizens. Security threats to the Saddam-regime archives will remain a major
challenge as long as Iraq remains a deeply fractured country under the sway of the militias
and Iran.
The Saddam-regime documents are unlikely to be made available anytime soon to either
Iraqi scholars studying the Baʿthist period or private citizens searching for their missing
relatives. Some of the documents may be relatively secure under the more responsible
stewardship of the Kadhimi government, but the present situation may prove only temporary.
As one of us (Montgomery) noted at the time of the August 31, 2020, repatriation,
“Iraq deserves its historical legacy back, and we can have some confidence that the
25
Kadhimi government will handle them [the documents] responsibly. But what happens after
his prime ministership ends may very well be problematic.”149
NOTES
1 Bruce P. Montgomery and Michael P. Brill, “The Ghosts of Past Wars Live On in a Critical Archive,” War on the
Rocks, September 11, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/09/the-ghosts- of-past-wars-live- on-in-a- critical
-archive.
2 Michael R. Gordon, “Baath Party Archives Return to Iraq, With the Secrets They Contain,” Wall Street Journal,
August 31, 2020, http://w ww.wsj.com/articles/baath-party-archives-return-to-iraq-with-the-secrets-they- contain
-11598907600; email correspondence to authors, November 22, 2019. Also quoted in Michael P. Brill, “Setting the
Records Straight in Iraq,” War on the Rocks, July 17, 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/07/setting-the-records
-straight-in-iraq.
3 Gordon, “Baath Party Archives Return to Iraq.”
4 John Gravois, “A Tug of War for Iraq’s Memory,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 8, 2008, https://w ww
.chronicle.com/article/a-tug-of-war-for-iraqs-memory.
5 For the third case, see Haidar Hadi, Rayan Ghazal, Erik Lunde, and Jean McElwee Cannon, “Mission to Baghdad,”
Hoover Digest (Winter 2021): 196–213.
6 The State Department rejected a FOIA request based on records from 2013 being too recent and thus exempt. The
most peculiar response came from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which wrote, “Based on the information
contained in your request, the Defense Intelligence Agency searched its systems of records for responsive
documents. Despite a thorough search, no documents responsive to your request were found.” This article
will demonstrate that the DIA was both the principal custodian and government agency behind the effort to
repatriate the Baʿthist state records to Iraq.
7 Jack Shafer, “Who Said It First? Journalism Is the ‘First Rough Draft of History,’” Slate, August 30, 2010, https://
slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/08/on-the-trail-of-the-question-who-f irst-said-or-wrote-that-journalism-is
-the-f irst-rough- draft- of-history.html.
8 For a single-volume work that covers the various collections of archives from the 1991 and 2003 wars,
see Bruce P. Montgomery, The Seizure of Saddam Hussein’s Archive of Atrocity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2019).
9 See Yaniv Voller, “Identity and the Baʿth Regime’s Campaign against Kurdish Rebels in Northern Iraq,”
Middle East Journal 71, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 383–401.
10 Sheri Laizer, “The Mustashar and the Jash: A View from the Position of Iraqi National Unity on the Descendants
of Treason,” Ekurd Daily, September 19, 2019, https://ekurd.net/the-mustashar-and-jash-2019- 09-19.
11 Inga Rogg and Hans Rimscha, “The Kurds as Party to and Victims of Conflict in Iraq,” International Review of
the Red Cross 89, no. 868 (December 2007), https://international-review.icrc.org/sites/default/f iles/irrc-868- 4.pdf.
12 Email from Ferdinand Hennerbichler to Bruce P. Montgomery, September 6, 2021.
13 Email from Ferdinand Hennerbichler.
14 Barton Gellman and Jonathan Randal, “US to Airlift Archive of Atrocities Out of Iraq,” Washington Post,
May 19, 1992, A12; and email correspondence between Bruce P. Montgomery and Joost Hiltermann, former
Iraq research director for Human Rights Watch, July 9–10, 2018.

26
15 Human Rights Watch, Bureaucracy of Repression: The Iraqi Government in Its Own Words (New York: Human
Rights Watch, 1994).
16 Gellman and Randal, “US to Airlift Archive of Atrocities out of Iraq”; see also “Kurds Detail Evidence of Iraqi
Atrocities in Kurdistan-Controlled Northern Iraq,” Christian Science Monitor, March 12, 1992, and Shelley Horn,
“Documents Give Evidence of Atrocities Against Iraqi Kurds,” Christian Science Monitor, June 10, 1992.
17 Montgomery, Seizure of Saddam Hussein’s Archive, 47–60; Joseph Sassoon and Michael Brill, “The North Iraq
Dataset (NIDS) Files: Northern Iraq Under Baʿthist Rule, 1968–1991,” Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World
14, nos. 1–2 (June 2020): 109–14; Rebecca Abby Whiting, “The Archive as an Artefact of Conflict: The North Iraq
Dataset,” Critical Military Studies (2019): 6–11, https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2019.1691409; Wisam H. Alshaibi
“Weaponizing Iraq’s Archives,” Middle East Report 40, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 5–7.
18 Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 203–6.
19 Joost Hiltermann, “Elusive Justice: Trying to Try Saddam,” Middle East Report, no. 215 (Summer 2000): 32–35,
https://doi.org /10.2307/1520153.
20 “CU-Boulder Archives Acquires Iraqi Secret Police Files, ” CU Boulder Today, February 3, 1998, https://w ww
.colorado.edu/today/1998/02/03/cu-boulder-archives-acquires-iraqi-secret-police-f iles.
21 Shortly after the University of Colorado Boulder received the eighteen metric tons of the secret police files in
1998, a former Peshmerga fighter living in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was recruited to help survey the files. He
noticed that the original files contained numerous personnel lists and payroll registers of Kurdish collaborators.
22 Email from Ferdinand Hennerbichler to Bruce P. Montgomery, September 6, 2021.
23 Laizer, “Mustashar and the Jash.”
24 Sassoon and Brill, “North Iraq Dataset (NIDS) Files,” 118.
25 Sassoon and Brill, 118.
26 See M. Cherif Bassiouni and Michael Wahid Hanna, “Ceding the High Ground: The Iraqi High Criminal Court
Statute and the Trial of Saddam Hussein,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 39, no. 1 (2006–7):
22–97, https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/jil/vol39/iss1/3/.
27 See Christopher Drew and Tresha Mabile, “Desert Graves in Northern Iraq Yield Evidence to Try Hussein,”
New York Times, June 7, 2005, https://w ww.nytimes.com/2005/06/07/world/middleeast/desert-graves-in
-northern-iraq-yield-evidence-to-try.html.
28 In keeping with Maliki’s focus on Baʿthists, he claimed to US officials that Saddam’s execution had to be
rushed due to a Baʿthist plot to overrun the Green Zone and prevent the execution. Michael R. Gordon and
Bernard E. Trainor, The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama
(New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 309–11.
29 Email from Ferdinand Hennerbichler to Bruce P. Montgomery, July 23, 2021.
30 Laizer, “Mustashar and the Jash.” This observation is also confirmed by Ferdinand Hennerbichler.
31 Laizer, “Mustashar and the Jash.”
32 “Operation Inherent Resolve: Lead Inspector General Report to the United States Congress,” October 1–December 31,
2021, 50, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/08/2002934802/-1/-1/1/LEAD%20INSPECTOR%20GENERAL%20
FOR%20OPERATION%20INHERENT%20RESOLVE%20OCTOBER%201,%202021%20TO%20DECEMBER%2031,%20
2021..PDF.
33 Sassoon and Brill, “North Iraq Dataset (NIDS) Files,” 118. If this development is confirmed, it will update
previous information that attested only to the records still in possession of the Iraqi central government in
27
Baghdad. Brill, “Setting the Records Straight in Iraq.” It would also correct the assertion that the records
remained in the possession of the Tribunal and Justice Ministry.
34 Kanan Makiya, The Rope (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016), 187. This gruesome pattern of sectarian violence
is described by Kanan Makiya, who writes in his novel, “His name [character] popped up whenever a new pile of
Sunni corpses was found with holes drilled into their hands and feet, and especially when the coup de grace took
the form of a hole drilled all the way through the victim’s skull. . . . Sunni killers preferred the knife—the Prophet’s
Companions used knives, they said—beheading their foes, not crucifying them. The Sunni knife was pitted against
the Shiʿa drill all through the battle for Baghdad.”
35 Bruce P. Montgomery and Ferdinand Hennerbichler, “The Kurdish Files of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Regime:
Struggle for Reconciliation in Iraq,” Advances in Anthropology 10, no. 3 (August 2020): 203, https://doi.org/10.4236
/aa.2020.103011.
36 See Douglas Cox, “Captured Iraqi Document Exploitation SOP,” Document Exploitation, February 27, 2012,
http://w ww.docexblog.com/2012/02/captured-iraqi-document-exploitation.html.
37 Alshaibi, “Weaponizing Iraq’s Archives,” 3.
38 Charles Duelfer, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 340.
39 See Michael Brill, “Remembering Desert Storm and the Gulf War Odyssey of Iraq’s Air Force, Part 2,” Woodrow
Wilson Center, January 15, 2021, https://w ww.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/remembering- desert-storm-and-gulf
-wars-odyssey-iraqs-air-force-part-2.
40 “Comprehensive Report of the Special Adviser to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD,” Central Intelligence Agency,
September 30, 2004, https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-DUELFERREPORT.
41 Scott Shane, “Iraqi Documents Are Put on Web, and Search Is On,” New York Times, March 28, 2006, https://
www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/politics/iraqi-documents-are-put-on-web-and-search-is-on.html.
42 William J. Broad, “US Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer,” New York Times, November 3, 2006,
https://w ww.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/middleeast/03documents.html.
43 Kevin Woods, Williamson Murray, and Thomas Holaday, “Project 1946,” Institute for Defense Analyses,
December 2007, https://w ww.ida.org /research-and-publications/publications/all/p/pr/project-1946.
44 Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray, “Saddam’s Delusions: The View from the Inside,” Foreign
Affairs 85, no. 3 (May–June 2006): 2–26.
45 See, respectively: Kevin M. Woods, Williamson Murray, Elizabeth A. Nathan, Laila Sabara, and Ana M. Venegas,
Saddam’s Generals: Perspectives of the Iran-Iraq War (Alexandria, Virginia: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2010);
Kevin M. Woods, Michael R. Pease, Mark E. Stout, Williamson Murray, and James G. Lacey, The Iraqi Perspectives
Report: Saddam’s Senior Leadership on Operation Iraqi Freedom from the Official U.S. Joint Forces Command
Report (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2006); Kevin M. Woods, David D. Palkki, and Mark E. Stout
(eds.), The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime 1978–2001 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2011); Williamson Murray and Kevin M. Woods, The Iran-Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) and The Mother of All Battles: Saddam Hussein’s Strategic
Plan for the Persian Gulf War (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2008); and Kevin M. Woods and
James Lacey, “Iraqi Perspectives Project: Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi
Documents, Volume 1 (Redacted),” Institute for Defense Analyses, November 2007, https://fas.org /irp/eprint
/iraqi/v1.pdf.
46 Michael R. Gordon, “Papers from Iraqi Archive Reveal Conspiratorial Mind-Set of Hussein,” New York Times,
October 25, 2011, https://w ww.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/world/middleeast/archive- offers-rare-glimpse-inside
-mind- of-saddam-hussein.html?hp.

28
47 Fritz T. Epstein, “Washington Research Opportunities in the Period of World War II,” American Archivist 17, no. 3
(July 1954): 225–36.
48 For termination of operations, see Michael R. Gordon, “Archive of Captured Enemy Documents Closes,”
New York Times, June 21, 2015, https://w ww.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/world/middleeast/archive- of- captured
-terrorist- qaeda-hussein- documents-shuts- down.html; for repatriation, see Mark Stout, “Understand Our Wars
and Enemies? Nah . . .” War on the Rocks, August 21, 2013, https://warontherocks.com/2013/08/understand-our
-wars-and-enemies-nah.
49 Montgomery and Brill, “Ghosts of Past Wars.”
50 Montgomery, Seizure of Saddam Hussein’s Archive, 109–10.
51 As quoted in Stuart Jeffries, “Books, Tears and Blood: Saad Eskander, Director of Baghdad’s National Library,”
The Guardian, June 8, 2008, https://w ww.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/09/iraq.iraqandthearts. See also
Saad Eskander, “Iraq National Library and Archive: Inherited Difficulties and New Challenges,” Alexandria 22,
no. 1 (2011): 47–51.
52 Nabil Al-Tikriti, “ ‘Stuff Happens’: A Brief Overview of the 2003 Destruction of Iraqi Manuscript Collections,
Archives, and Libraries,” Library Trends 55, no. 3 (Winter 2007): 730–45.
53 Saad Eskander, “The Tale of Iraq’s Cemetery of Books,” Information Today 21, no. 11 (December 2004): 1,
50–54.
54 Makiya’s role is covered in detail in George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2005), especially chapter 1: “An Unfinished War.”
55 Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
56 For a relatively early yet still one of the most thorough profiles of Makiya and his activities until that time, see
Lawrence Weschler, “Architects amid the Ruins,” New Yorker, January 6, 1992, 40–65, https://w ww.newyorker.com
/magazine/1992/01/06/architects-amid-the-ruins.
57 For more details on the Iraq Research and Documentation Project, the precursor to the Iraq Memory Foundation,
see Sassoon and Brill, “North Iraq Dataset (NIDS) Files,” 115–19, Alshaibi, “Weaponizing Iraq’s Archives,” 5–8, and
Whiting, “The Archive as an Artefact of Conflict,” 7–9.
58 See the Iraq Memory Foundation’s website, http://w ww.iraqmemory.com/en/about.
59 Bruce P. Montgomery, “US Seizure, Exploitation, and Restitution of Saddam Hussein’s Archive of Atrocity,”
Journal of American Studies 48, no. 2 (May 2014): 581.
60 Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 2020), 190–91.
61 Chapter titled “Tracing the Baʿth Regional Command Collection” in Rebecca Abby Whiting, “Archives, Conflict
and Power: Iraqi Archives Displaced to the USA during the Gulf Wars,” doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 2021,
30–32. The authors are grateful to Whiting for sharing her dissertation chapter prior to submitting it.
62 “Iraq Memory Foundation-United States of America Memorandum of Understanding,” February 2, 2005. The
document is signed by Hassan Mneimneh on behalf of the IMF and Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense
Doman O. McArthur. The authors were provided with a copy of the document.
63 For uploading to the database, see “Memorandum of Understanding,” February 2, 2005; for return to IMF, see
Montgomery, Seizure of Saddam Hussein’s Archive, 177–80.
64 Adam Gorlick, “Saddam Hussein’s Papers, along with Controversy, Find a Temporary Home with the
Hoover Institution,” Stanford Report, June 18, 2008, https://news.s tanford.e du/news/2008/june18/iraq
- 061808.html.
29
65 Saad Eskander, “Minerva Research Initiative: Searching for the Truth or Denying the Iraqis the Right to Know
the Truth?” Counterpoise 12, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 46–49.
66 “MESA Academic Freedom Award: Saad Eskander,” Middle East Studies Association, 2007, https://mesana.org
/awards/awardee/mesa-academic-freedom-award/saad-eskander.
67 See “ACA/SAA Joint Statement on Iraqi Records,” Society of American Archivists, April 22, 2008, https://w ww2
.archivists.org /statements/acasaa-joint-statement- on-iraqi-records.
68 Gordon and Trainor, Endgame, 186–87. In November 2005, US forces uncovered the Jadriya Bunker, which held
hundreds of prisoners, many showing signs of abuse. American officers noticed that many of the prisoners were
former Iraqi Air Force pilots or their relatives, suggesting that the facility was being used to settle scores from
the failed March 1991 uprising against Saddam’s rule. In the Shiʿite Arab–majority south in particular, helicopter
gunships had been central to brutally crushing the uprising.
69 By 2007 and 2008, this fact had been known for years. One of the most notorious cases was when Badr Brigade’s
Bayan Jabr became interior minister in April 2005. See Ken Silverstein, “The Minister of Civil War: Bayan Jabr,
Paul Bremer, and the Rise of the Iraqi Death Squads,” Harper’s Magazine 313, no. 1875 (August 2006): 67–73.
Around the same time Jabr arrived at the interior ministry, Hakim al-Zamili and Hamid al-Shammari—Mahdi Army
officers loyal to Shiʿite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr—took over the health ministry, where they used ambulances for
transporting guns and kidnappings and hospitals as execution centers. Gordon and Trainor, Endgame, 222–23.
While US military leaders and diplomats had expended considerable efforts in 2007 and 2008 to have the worst of
such sectarian offenders removed from their positions, most remained on the sidelines, biding their time. Gordon
and Trainor, 505–11.
70 Devin Banerjee, “Iraq Asks Hoover to Return Records,” Stanford Daily, May 25, 2010, https://w ww.stanforddaily
.com/2010/05/25/iraq-asks-hoover-to-return-records.
71 “Iraqi National Security Adviser Falih al-Fayyadh Visits Hoover,” Hoover Institution, October 25, 2011, https://
www.hoover.org /news/iraqi-national-security-adviser-falih-al-fayyadh-visits-hoover.
72 Michael D. Shear, “Many Steps to Be Taken When ‘Sequester’ Is Law,” New York Times, February 28, 2013,
https://w ww.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/us/politics/many-steps-to-be-taken-when-sequester-is-law.html.
73 Todd Harrison, “What Has the Budget Control Act of 2011 Meant for Defense?” Center for Strategic and
International Studies, August 1, 2016, https://w ww.c sis.org /analysis/what-has-budget- control-act-2011-meant
-defense.
74 Jeanne Sahadi, “Obama Signs the Order Triggering Spending Cuts,” CNN, March 1, 2013, https://money.cnn
.com/2013/03/01/news/economy/spending-cuts-obama/index.html.
75 Anonymous source, telephone conversation with the authors, August 5, 2019.
76 This detail was mentioned in in-person and telephone conversations, along with email correspondences, by
several current and former State and Defense department officials in 2019 and 2020.
77 Several sources present at the US embassy in Baghdad in 2012 and 2013 confirmed that it was the DIA in Qatar
that initiated the process, looping in the State Department and raising the issue to the interagency level. They
also confirmed that Falih al-Fayyadh came to the US embassy on multiple occasions and that he was the principal
Iraqi official they dealt with on this subject.
78 Anonymous source, telephone conversation with the authors, March 11, 2020.
79 John Lee, “Iraq and US Reaffirm Strategic Partnership,” Iraq-Business News, September 4, 2012, https://w ww
.iraq-businessnews.com/2012/09/0 4/iraq-and-us-reaffirm-strategic-partnership.
80 “Relinquishment of Possession,” May 16, 2013. US government document shared anonymously with the
authors.

30
81 Email correspondence with participant, November 25, 2019.
82 See chapter 2 in particular in Astrid M. Eckert, The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of
German Archives after the Second World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 99–167.
83 Leopold Auer, “Displaced Archives in the Wake of Wars,” in Displaced Archives, ed. James Lowry (Oxfordshire,
UK: Routledge, 2017), 120–21.
84 This fact was confirmed by two sources in July and August 2019. Several other sources when informed of it
confirmed it would have made sense in the context.
85 Embassy of the United States of America, Baghdad, no. 2013-923, April 22, 2013. US document shared
anonymously with the authors.
86 “Invoice: Doha to Umm Qasr-Iraq-by Sea,” no. 43009245, April 8, 2013. US government document shared
anonymously with the authors.
87 Telephone conversation with the authors, August 15, 2019.
89 “Relinquishment of Possession.”
90 “Ministry of Foreign Affairs List of Importing Goods from Abroad for the Diplomatic Boards Accredited in Iraq
Accompanying Diplomatic Note No. 2013-923,” April 22, 2013. US government document shared anonymously
with the authors.
91 Hania Mufti, “Iraq: State of the Evidence,” Human Rights Watch 16, no. 7 (November 2004): 1–41.
92 Anonymous source, email correspondence with the authors, November 25, 2019.
93 Anonymous source, telephone conversation with the authors, December 10, 2019.
94 Anonymous source, telephone conversation with the authors, February 12, 2020.
95 Anonymous source, telephone conversation, August 15, 2019.
96 See chapter 6, “The Declaration of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham” in Haroro J. Ingram, Craig Whiteside,
and Charlie Winter, eds., The ISIS Reader: Milestone Texts of the Islamic State Movement (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2020), 149–60.
97 Michael Knights, “Yes, Iraq Is Unraveling,” Foreign Policy, May 15, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/15
/yes-iraq-is-unraveling.
98 Tim Arango, “Maliki Agrees to Relinquish Power in Iraq,” New York Times, August 14, 2014, https://w ww
.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/world/middleeast/iraq-prime-minister-.html.
99 Aaron Magid, “The Curious Case of Falih al-Fayyadh,” 1001 Iraqi Thoughts, February 20, 2019, https://
1001iraqithoughts.com/2019/02/20/the-curious-case -of-falih-al-fayyadh.
100 “Fāliḥ al-Fayyāḍ . . . Ṣaddām Ḥussein aṭlaq sarāḥī baʿd sajnī khamsa aʿawām bisabab nuzūlhi fī muḍīf
ʿashīratī,” Alsharqiya Tube, May 28, 2019, https://w ww.youtube.com/watch?v=VmGizyRtDSM&feature=emb
_logo.
101 David Daoud, “PMF Deputy Commander Muhandis Details Hezbollah Ops in Iraq,” Long War Journal,
January 9, 2017, https://w ww.longwarjournal.org /archives/2017/01/pmf-deputy-commander-muhandis
-details-hezbollah-ops-in-iraq.php.
102 “Treasury Designates Individual, Entity Posing Threat to Stability in Iraq,” US Department of the Treasury,
July 2, 2009, https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/recent-actions/20090702.
31
103 Michael Crowley, Falih Hassan, and Eric Schmitt, “US Strike in Iraq Kills Qassim Suleimani, Commander
of Iranian Forces,” New York Times, January 2, 2020, https://w ww.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/world/middleeast
/qassem-soleimani-iraq-iran-attack.html.
104 Aida Arosoaie, “Hadi al-Amiri’s Grip on Iraq,” Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses 15, no. 10
(November 2015): 19–24.
105 Dexter Filkins, “What We Left Behind in Iraq,” New Yorker, April 21, 2014, https://w ww.newyorker.com
/magazine/2014/0 4/28/what-we-left-behind.
106 Anonymous source, email correspondence with the authors, November 22, 2019. Also quoted in Brill,
“Setting the Records Straight in Iraq.”
107 Max Fisher, “Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Gutted in Political Purges, New Cables Show,” The Atlantic,
December 3, 2010, https://w ww.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/12/iraqs-security-and-intelligence
-gutted-in-political-purges-new-cables-show/67431.
108 For just a few examples, see Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC), National Defense University, Washington,
DC: SH-IDGS-D-000-600, “Correspondence Regarding the Execution of Alleged Members of the Daʿwa Party,”
May 1982–January 1986, CRRC SH-MISC-D-000-310, “Execution Sentence against a Group of Individuals for Their
Affiliation with the Daʿwa Party in 1983,” June 1983, and CRRC SH-IDGS-D-000-680, “Regulation for the Manner
of Dealing with the Relatives of Sentenced Daʿwa Party Members,” January 10, 1985. The original copies of these
records were among those repatriated to Iraq in May 2013.
109 See Ned Parker and Raheem Salman, “Notes from the Underground: The Rise of Nouri al-Maliki and the New
Islamists,” World Policy Journal 30, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 63–76.
110 Ali Khedery, “Why We Stuck with Maliki—and Lost Iraq,” Washington Post, July 3, 2014, https://w ww
.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-we-s tuck-with-maliki--and-lost-iraq/2014/07/03/0 dd6a8a4 -f 7ec-11e3
-a606 -946fd632f9f1_ story.html.
111 Marisa Sullivan, Middle East Security Report 10, “Maliki’s Authoritarian Regime, Institute for the Study of War,”
April 2013, https://w ww.understandingwar.org/sites/default/f iles/Malikis-Authoritarian-Regime-Web.pdf.
112 “Maliki Takes Over Iraq’s Security Services,” UPI, October 8, 2012, https://w ww.upi.com/Top_News/Special
/2012/10/08/Maliki-takes-over-Iraqs-security-services/66651349712904.
113 See chapter 3, “The First Year of the Islamic State,” in Ingram, Whiteside, and Winter, ISIS Reader, 57–91.
114 Parker and Salman, “Notes from the Underground,” 73–74.
115 Craig Whiteside, “The Islamic State and the Return of Revolutionary Warfare,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 27,
no. 5 (2016): 752–68.
116 See David Romano, “Iraq’s Descent into Civil War: A Constitutional Explanation,” Middle East Journal 68, no. 4
(Autumn 2014): 547–66.
117 Khedery, “Why We Stuck with Maliki.”
118 Jack Healy, “Arrest Order for Sunni Leader in Iraq Opens New Rift,” New York Times, December 19, 2011,
https://w ww.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/world/middleeast/iraqi-government-accuses-top- official-in
-assassinations.html.
119 Kirk H. Sowell, “Maliki’s Anbar Blunder,” Foreign Policy, January 15, 2014, https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01
/15/malikis-anbar-blunder.
121 Montgomery and Hennerbichler, “Kurdish Files,” 191–93.

32
123 Respectively: anonymous source, in-person conversation with the authors, May 21, 2020; anonymous source,
email correspondence with the authors, September 7, 2019.
124 Anonymous source, email correspondence with the authors, October 11, 2021.
125 For State Department comment, see Gordon, “Baath Party Archives Return to Iraq.”
126 Anonymous source, in-person conversation with the authors, October 17, 2019.
127 Paul Wood, “Brett McGurk: A Hero of Our Time,” New Lines Magazine, April 19, 2021, https://newlinesmag.com
/argument/brett-mcgurk-a-hero-of-our-time.
128 Anonymous source, in-person conversation with the authors, October 17, 2019.
129 Anonymous source, email correspondence with the authors, December 17, 2019.
130 James Risen, Tim Arango, Farnaz Fassihi, Murtaza Hussain, and Ronen Bergman, “A Spy Complex Revealed:
Leaked Iranian Intelligence Reports Expose Tehran’s Vast Web of Influence in Iraq,” The Intercept and New York
Times, November 17, 2019, 9:10 p.m., https://theintercept.com/2019/11/18/iran-iraq-spy- cables.
131 “Iraq Sets a Date for Restoring the Jewish and Anfal Archives from America,” Shafaq, February 9, 2020,
https://shafaq.com/ku/Iraq-News/iraq-sets-a-date-for-restoring-the-jewish-and-anfal-archives-from-america.
132 Anonymous source, telephone conversation with the authors, February 12, 2020.
133 Quoted in Jeffrey Spurr, “Dr. Saad Eskander’s Forced Departure from Iraq’s National Library and Archives
Deplored,” History News Network, April 3, 2015, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/158698.
134 “Scholars, Artists Protest Dr. Saad Eskander’s Forced Departure from Iraq’s National Library,” Arab Lit
Quarterly, August 31, 2015, https://arablit.org/2015/08/31/dr-saad- eskander/.
135 Montgomery, Seizure of Saddam Hussein’s Archive, 112–13.
136 Anonymous source, telephone conversation, August 15, 2019, and telephone conversation, February 12, 2020.
137 Nitish Kulkarni, “Iraqi Ambassador Visits Stanford for Hoover Institution Conference on Saddam-Era
Documents,” Stanford Daily, June 3, 2014, https://w ww.stanforddaily.com/2014/06/03/iraqi-ambassador-visits
-stanford-for-hoover-institution-conference-on-saddam-era-documents.
138 Peter Kenyon, “Saddam’s Spy Files: Key to Healing or More Hurting?,” National Public Radio News, June 24,
2010, https://w ww.npr.org /transcripts/127986894.
139 Hafsa Halawa, Shahla Al-Kli, Yesar Al-Maleki, Randa Slim, Robert S. Ford, and Alex Vatanka, “Iraq Special
Briefing: The Challenges Facing Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi,” Middle East Institute, May 12, 2020, https://
www.mei.edu/blog /iraq-special-briefing-challenges-facing-prime-minister-mustafa-al-kadhimi.
140 “Falih Fayyadh Officially Appointed as Hashd al-Shaabi Chairman,” BasNews, July 17, 2020, https://w ww
.basnews.com/en/babat/619482.
141 Michael P. Brill, “Falih al-Fayyadh’s Fall from Grace: The Inside Story of the Treasury Department’s Sanctioning
of Iraq’s PMF Chairman and What Is at Stake,” Caravan Notebook, Hoover Institution, April 2, 2021, https://w ww
.hoover.org/research/falih-al-fayyadhs-fall-grace-inside-story-treasury- departments-sanctioning-iraqs-pmf.
142 The details in this and the surrounding paragraphs are largely derived from informal conversations with
US officials and Iraqi sources during the spring and summer of 2020.
143 Omar al-Jaffal, “Iraq’s Baath Party Archive Location Unknown,” Al-Monitor, September 23, 2020, https://w ww
.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/09/iraq-baath-archive-us.html.
33
144 Aaron Mehta, “Kathryn Wheelbarger, Pentagon’s Top Foreign Policy Official, Resigns,” DefenseNews, June 18,
2020, https://w ww.defensenews.com/pentagon/2020/06/18/kathryn-wheelbarger-top-foreign-policy-defense
-official-resigns.
145 See Hadi, Ghazal, Lunde, and McElwee Cannon, “Mission to Baghdad,” 209–11.
146 Gordon, “Baath Party Archives Return to Iraq.” Most of the subsequent news coverage in Arabic and English
responded to the WSJ article. However, around the same time that the plane carrying the documents landed in
Baghdad at 5:00 p.m. local time, the Lebanese independent media website Daraj ran the first installment of a
two-part article in both English and Arabic. See Jamal Ameadi, “US Hoover Institution Documents Return to Iraq:
The Tale of the Baʿth Regional Command Archive,” Daraj, August 31, 2020, https://daraj.com/en/53961, and Jamal
Ameadi, “The Hoover Institution’s Documents Return to Iraq: The Full Story of the Regional Command Archives,”
Daraj, September 2, 2020, https://daraj.com/en/5 4133.
147 For example, see Ben Taub, “Iraq’s Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge,” New Yorker, December 28, 2018, https://
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/24/iraqs-post-isis- campaign- of-revenge.
148 Quoted in Maya Gebeily, “Return of Saddam-Era Archive to Iraq Opens Debate, Old Wounds,” AFP, posted on
Yahoo.com, September 10, 2020, https://w ww.yahoo.com/now/return-saddam- era-archive-iraq- 015740376.html.
149 Quoted in Gordon, “Baath Party Archives Return to Iraq.”

35
The publisher has made this work available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 4.0 International license.
To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0.
The views expressed in this essay are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff,
officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.
hoover.org
Copyright © 2022 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About the Authors About The Caravan Notebook
The Caravan Notebook is a platform for essays and podcasts
that offer commentary on a variety of subjects, ranging
from current events to cultural trends, and including topics
that are too local or too specific from the larger questions
addressed quarterly in The Caravan.
We draw on the membership of Hoover’s Herbert and Jane

Dwight Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic
World, and on colleagues elsewhere who work that same
BRUCE P. MONTGOMERY political and cultural landscape. Russell Berman chairs the
Bruce P. Montgomery is former project from which this effort originates.
professor and director of archives
and special collections at the
University of Colorado Boulder,
where he developed a leading The Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group
human rights archives and
on the Middle East and the Islamic World
initiated the Iraq Documents
Project, acquiring eighteen tons The Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on the Middle
of Iraqi secret police records seized
East and the Islamic World studies a range of political,
by the Kurds in 1991. He is author
social, and cultural problems in the region with the goal
of The Seizure of Saddam Hussein’s
Archive of Atrocity. of informing American foreign policy choices and the
wider public discussion. The working group draws on the
intellectual resources of an array of scholars and practitioners
from within the United States and abroad to foster the
pursuit of modernity, to combat Islamist radicalism, to
promote human flourishing, and to spread the rule of
law, human rights, and democratic governance in Islamic
lands—developments that are critical to the very order of
the international system. The working group is chaired by
Hoover fellow Russell Berman.
MICHAEL P. BRILL
For more information about this Hoover Institution Working
Michael P. Brill is a PhD candidate
Group, visit us online at www.hoover.org/research-teams/middle
in the Department of Near Eastern
Studies at Princeton University,
-east-and-islamic-world-working-group.
where his research focuses on
Baʿthist and contemporary Iraq.
Hoover Institution, Stanford University Hoover Institution in Washington

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Stanford, CA 94305-6003 Washington, DC 20005
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A HOOVER INSTITUTION ESSAY FROM THE CARAVAN NOTEBOOK

The Middle East and the Islamic World

This article’s research methodology combines both investigative-journalistic and historical

Prelude: The Anfal Files

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

The documents detailed mass executions, disappearances, forced deportations, poison

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

In June 2019, the University of Colorado Boulder also returned fifty-seven boxes of

Seizure of the Baʿthist State Archives in the 2003 War

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

Amid the escalating controversy, in April 2010 a three-member Iraqi delegation, including

The Budget Sequester

US Covertly Returns the Seized Records in 2013

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

Delivering the Files into Authoritarian Hands

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

The Last Baʿthist Documents in the United States

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

The appointment of Kadhimi to Iraq’s premiership in May 2020—following his role since

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

3 ​Gordon, “Baath Party Archives Return to Iraq.”

12 ​Email from Ferdinand Hennerbichler to Bruce P. Montgomery, September 6, 2021.

13 ​Email from Ferdinand Hennerbichler.

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

22 ​Email from Ferdinand Hennerbichler to Bruce P. Montgomery, September 6, 2021.

23 ​Laizer, “Mustashar and the Jash.”

24 ​Sassoon and Brill, “North Iraq Dataset (NIDS) Files,” 118.

25 ​Sassoon and Brill, 118.

29 ​Email from Ferdinand Hennerbichler to Bruce P. Montgomery, July 23, 2021.

31 ​Laizer, “Mustashar and the Jash.”

37 ​Alshaibi, “Weaponizing Iraq’s Archives,” 3.

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

49 ​Montgomery and Brill, “Ghosts of Past Wars.”

50 ​Montgomery, Seizure of Saddam Hussein’s Archive, 109–10.

58 ​See the Iraq Memory Foundation’s website, http://­w ww​.­iraqmemory​.­com​/­en​/­about.

78 ​Anonymous source, telephone conversation with the authors, March 11, 2020.

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

81 ​Email correspondence with participant, November 25, 2019.

87 Telephone conversation with the authors, August 15, 2019.

92 ​Anonymous source, email correspondence with the authors, November 25, 2019.

93 ​Anonymous source, telephone conversation with the authors, December 10, 2019.

94 ​Anonymous source, telephone conversation with the authors, February 12, 2020.

95 ​Anonymous source, telephone conversation, August 15, 2019.

114 ​Parker and Salman, “Notes from the Underground,” 73–74.

117 ​Khedery, “Why We Stuck with Maliki.”

121 ​Montgomery and Hennerbichler, “Kurdish Files,” 191–93.

Hoover Institution • Stanford University

124 ​Anonymous source, email correspondence with the authors, October 11, 2021.

126 ​Anonymous source, in-person conversation with the authors, October 17, 2019.

128 ​Anonymous source, in-person conversation with the authors, October 17, 2019.

129 ​Anonymous source, email correspondence with the authors, December 17, 2019.

3 Gordon, “Baath Party Archives Return to Iraq.”

12 Email from Ferdinand Hennerbichler to Bruce P. Montgomery, September 6, 2021.

13 Email from Ferdinand Hennerbichler.

22 Email from Ferdinand Hennerbichler to Bruce P. Montgomery, September 6, 2021.

23 Laizer, “Mustashar and the Jash.”

24 Sassoon and Brill, “North Iraq Dataset (NIDS) Files,” 118.

25 Sassoon and Brill, 118.

29 Email from Ferdinand Hennerbichler to Bruce P. Montgomery, July 23, 2021.

31 Laizer, “Mustashar and the Jash.”

37 Alshaibi, “Weaponizing Iraq’s Archives,” 3.

49 Montgomery and Brill, “Ghosts of Past Wars.”

50 Montgomery, Seizure of Saddam Hussein’s Archive, 109–10.

58 See the Iraq Memory Foundation’s website, http://w ww.iraqmemory.com/en/about.

78 Anonymous source, telephone conversation with the authors, March 11, 2020.

81 Email correspondence with participant, November 25, 2019.

92 Anonymous source, email correspondence with the authors, November 25, 2019.

93 Anonymous source, telephone conversation with the authors, December 10, 2019.

94 Anonymous source, telephone conversation with the authors, February 12, 2020.

95 Anonymous source, telephone conversation, August 15, 2019.

114 Parker and Salman, “Notes from the Underground,” 73–74.

117 Khedery, “Why We Stuck with Maliki.”

121 Montgomery and Hennerbichler, “Kurdish Files,” 191–93.

124 Anonymous source, email correspondence with the authors, October 11, 2021.

126 Anonymous source, in-person conversation with the authors, October 17, 2019.

128 Anonymous source, in-person conversation with the authors, October 17, 2019.

129 Anonymous source, email correspondence with the authors, December 17, 2019.

132 Anonymous source, telephone conversation with the authors, February 12, 2020.

135 Montgomery, Seizure of Saddam Hussein’s Archive, 112–13.

149 Quoted in Gordon, “Baath Party Archives Return to Iraq.”